Prototype Developers Radical Reduced to ''Support Capacity", Staff Let Go

[News Portal]

Radical Entertainment, the developers behind such titles as the Prototype franchise, Scarface and The Simpsons Hit & Run, has been been reduced to a support role for other Activision studios and titles. "Some employees will remain working for Radical Entertainment supporting other existing Activision Publishing projects, but the studio will cease development of its own games going forward," Activision have said in a statement.

Source: Kotaku

Read full article by GON News

[revengous]

damn.

[Tim Colwill]

Sad news. I really like Prototype

Best of luck to all the Radical staff laid off as part of this.

[SickProphet]

Love Prototype don't love Activision.

[spkypwnsuall]

Sad news. I really like Prototype

Best of luck to all the Radical staff laid off as part of this.

Agreed. Prototype was an awesome game, and I'm still waiting for Prototype 2 on PC...

Hopefully they'll get together again under a different publisher.

[Shinanigans]

Update: When reached for comment, Radical parent company Activision sent Kotaku the following statement:

Although we made a substantial investment in the Prototype IP, it did not find a broad commercial audience. Radical is a very talented team of developers, however, we have explored various options for the studio, including a potential sale of the business, and have made a difficult conclusion through the consultation process that the only remaining option is a significant reduction in staff. As such, some employees will remain working for Radical Entertainment supporting other existing Activision Publishing projects, but the studio will cease development of its own games going forward.

Apparently 2+ million copies isn't a broad commercial audience. It's **** when the developers pay the price for publishers over-investment. Especially considering Activision is worth billions.

[exe3]

I hate that in this day and age 2 million sold units isn't considered a commercial success. What happened to the days when breaking a million copies was cause for celebration? Oh yeah, CoD.

Such a shame too as Prototype was fun.

[Lord_Apophis]

I hate that in this day and age 2 million sold units isn't considered a commercial success. What happened to the days when breaking a million copies was cause for celebration? Oh yeah, CoD.

Such a shame too as Prototype was fun.

The developer wasn't that big either, they only had 90 staff members...
2 million copies for a team of that size should be a good achievement!
That amount of sales would bring in what, 100 million dollars at a minimum? That's more than 10 million per employee. (Not including advertising and distribution costs though and not factoring different region pricing.)

Bah, Activison is just as bad as EA in this regard. If the title doesn't sell millions they close them down, even if they are profitable. (They like the bottom line to look good.)

[rapid101]

Actually, their revenue would be in the vicinity of $20-40 for the sale (I don't remember how much Prototype sold for), taking out Steam's cut (was it 30%?) or brick and morter.

Factoring in not just development costs, but shipping, web server costs to handle traffic, all the taxes paid on employees ($100,000-300,000 per person not counting executives), the money lost from not investing elsewhere (gotta make the average joe/shareholder happy; Activision probably regret not pumping it into BLOPS 2) over the 4 years or so @ 10% each year, platform rights for the 3 major ones and the enhanced development costs for this (although hopefully the individual platforms, especially PC, made back the cost invested into them).

TL;DR, money.

Until I check Activision's FS for that year I think it made a profit, just not an acceptable one at 10% RoI or the likes.

Not to forget they never got around to grossness that is DLC surprisingly.

However, I still think it was gross mismanagement, even though 90 employees is 4 million+ territory. Or it could simply be 'metacritic not high enough' even though reviews are purely subjective and I base a game on its reputation not a number.

Actually, I reckon there was a conflict of interest, as all their games have been successful; maybe because their modern warfare/CoD team would be working for cheap as chips (the games aren't innovative; just winning on reputation alone) and would expect that from all their studios, whereas something like Prototype would be the big seller for any other studio.

[Syncourt]

Prototype 2 is still coming out on PC right?

[spkypwnsuall]

Yes, if i remember correctly, there was a tweet (or some equally as short message) from Activision saying that P2 will still be released for PC.

If I find the source, I'll link it up.

EDIT: I was wrong, it wasn't a tweet. After doing a bit of research, turns out that was just an extract. Anyway, if you look at their FB Page (https://www.facebook.com/radical.ent), there are 2 messages:

"Hi everyone. Yes, there's some unfortunate news to share today. This morning Radical Entertainment went through a significant reduction in staff. We're very proud of what we achieved with the PROTOTYPE franchise, but unfortunately, the Blacklight virus didn't spread as far as it could. For PC gamers, rest assured that the PC version of PROTOTYPE 2 is still going to launch on July 24th as planned. And a special "thanks" to the PROTOTYPE Army and all our extremely loyal and passionate fans for supporting Radical Entertainment. We couldn't have come this far without you."

And:

"Thanks again to everyone for the outpouring of support. Just a reminder that the PC version of PROTOTYPE 2 is indeed, still coming on July 24th as planned, but please understand that updates/posts to Facebook over the next few days may be a bit light as we gain our bearing after today."

[Syncourt]

Gooooood! I've been looking forward to that for a while now. I just hope it doesn't have any major issues on release, because it doesn't sound like we will be getting any updates for it.

Hope they get together under a new (better) publisher, **** being moved from development to support!

[spkypwnsuall]

They'll stay in support for a while and patch any issues; Activision don't want to ruin their reputation. IF they make P2 buggy, it'll give customers a bad/worse view on Activision. No way they'd let that happen.

[Artful-dodgeR]

...you think they'd wait til after the PC release to work out true sales figures.